Considering the recess appointment. Although perhaps the lesson here is that the only people in the room being honest are those who don’t flip their point of view depending on who’s in power, which might explain the lack of defense for those move observed on the left, those who wish to criticize this sort of thing in the future remain silent?

What would Edison say? Uhm, how about AC power is dangerous! Everyone should use DC only.

8 comments

8. IPAB – Sounds pretty Constitutional, square in the commerce clause, possibly another clause regard. uniform weights and measures. Personally I would trade micro-regulation of electrical appliances for a cap-n-trade or carbon tax system but your side doesn’t want that.

7. Recess appointment – It’s one thing to deny a vote on an appointment either because Congress doesn’t like the guy or Congress wants to flip off the administration. Yes the right way to do it is to actually have a vote but, well clearly best practices are bent. It’s a step above with the Consumer Protection Agency, though. The Republicans loss the vote, the law passed but they figure by denying the ability of anyone to be appointed to run the agency they can void the law without actually voting to repeal the law and overriding a veto.

#11. Well if someone comes up with Feminist Number Theory they can have a class for it and decide how to conduct it. Last time I checked, no such thing existed but Feminist philosophy does exist (as do other types of philosophy, like philosophy of mathematics, science, religion, ethics etc.).

Really? How exactly do you bar courts from addressing Constitutional claims over its rulings and actions? For example, suppose the agency regulates what payday lenders may say in their advertisements…say requiring them to post a yearly interest rate on their loans instead of just the weekly or monthly rate they charge. Why wouldn’t a payday lender be able to challenge that regulation in court on the grounds of ‘forced speech’ or ‘freedom of speech’?

Besides, if the law creating the agency was really unconstitutional, Republicans and their Wall Street allies would simply challenge it in court. If it was on its face unconstitutional, you wouldn’t have to wait for the agency to do anything or have its head appointed to challenge the law. Since this was not done, we can pretty much safely say its not because Wall Street and the GOP lacks lawyers, its because your chacterization of the law is false.

6.Back when newspapers didn’t assume people were morons they could have fun with infinity.

Here’s a slightly related issue I just read in a book about multiverses.

Say that we have some machine that generates universes and that while ‘fundamental properties’ of universes are random, the machine does generate universes with some probabilities….

For example, suppose that 10% of generated universes will have electrons and if a universe has electrons, there’s a 90% chance it will have protons and if it has electrons and protons there’s a 99.99999999999% chance it will have some other partical…say ‘Googletrons’ or whatnot. So we know our universe has electrons and protons, if this hypothesis is true then we probably have ‘Googletrons’. Suppose we hear that a partical accelerator has discovered ‘Googletrons’….or suppose it has discovered our universe has no such partical. What does that say about the hypothesis.

Well at first glance, it would seem to say if we discover our universe has them that supports the hypothesis, if it doesn’t then that cuts against it. After all, we know we have protons and electrons so the odds that the hypothesis is true and we just happen to not have ‘Googletrons’ is super, super tiny. But wait a minute, if this universe machine has churned out an infinite number of universes then one would expect to find an infinite number of universes which have protons, electrons and NO ‘Googletrons’ for the same reason that if you buy an infinite number of lottery tickets, you’re going to win the lottery an infinite number of times even though the odds of a winning ticket are very tiny.

Boonton,
So, if philosophy of science or mathematics &etc is a meta-consideration of that topic, i.e., not science but meta-science (what are the overarching rules or considerations of science) then what is “feminist philosophy”? A meta- explanation for a squishy mishmash of liberal politics and considerations of what is yin without talking about yang?